Time dulls the pain, but scars remain: A decade after Mayerthorpe massacre

Editor’s Note: Ten years ago, on March 3, 2005, four Alberta RCMP officers were shot and killed on a farm near Mayerthorpe, in what was the worst multiple killing of Mounties in modern Canadian history. In a two-part series, we look at what has changed in the past decade. Today: For the RCMP, that day will always cast a shadow.

jpruden

Updated: March 3, 2015

Edmonton Police Service, Chief of Police Rod Knecht and RCMP Deputy Commissioner Marianne Ryan talk about what they were doing on the day that four RCMP officers were killed in Mayerthorpe and how it has affected their lives. Video by Greg Southam, Edmonton Journal.

Editor’s Note: Ten years ago, on March 3, 2005, four Alberta RCMP officers were shot and killed on a farm near Mayerthorpe, in what was the worst multiple killing of Mounties in modern Canadian history. In a two-part series, we look at what has changed in the past decade.

Today: For the RCMP, that day will always cast a shadow.

Tuesday: The officers’ families and the town’s residents try to move on, but never forget.

—

Dawn broke on the farm just after 7, lighting a prairie spring of snow and ice and mud, the Quonset’s curves of corrugated steel.

He was hidden behind a white plastic drum amid the stolen truck parts and farm junk, the smell of green marijuana heavy in the air. He was small but strong, with deep-set eyes and a tight, thin mouth, a bulky figure under several layers of clothes. He carried an assault rifle with a 9-millimetre pistol tucked into the waistband of his pants and had a Winchester rifle nearby.

There had been a feeling of tension at the property overnight but as the darkness dissipated, the mood lightened.

RCMP constables Peter Schiemann and Brock Myrol arrived around 9:30 a.m., joining constables Anthony Gordon and Leo Johnston in the farmyard. Two officers from the auto theft unit pulled up the long driveway not long after.

While the auto theft officers got into their coveralls and readied their equipment, the others headed toward the Quonset’s open doors. Four men — Gordon, Johnston, Schiemann and Myrol — walked together from sunlight into darkness.

—

It comes back the strongest when a police officer is shot or killed. During Moncton, after St. Albert, the pain felt fresh and raw.

But it’s always there, carried in a cold spring breeze, a song on the radio, a date on a calendar.

“It’s been a tough 10 years,” RCMP Staff Sgt. Brian Pinder says. “You still live your life, you still go to work, but one person told me it’s a life-altering event, and I think that captures it.”

When asked how he changed after Mayerthorpe, Pinder is quiet.

“Not for the better.”

On the morning of March 3, 2005, Pinder was the head of the Mayerthorpe RCMP detachment, a busy rural police station manned by nine officers and three support staff. He had been off work for a few days for a human resources course, and was at home making coffee when he got the call about a shooting at James Roszko’s property near Rochfort Bridge.

Pinder had worked with Peter Schiemann, Leo Johnston and Anthony Gordon for several years, and knew them well. Brock Myrol had just started at the detachment, but Pinder was already impressed with the rookie officer.

The call, Pinder says, “was like being eviscerated.”

He ran to his car and sped toward the detachment to get his uniform and his gun.

At RCMP headquarters in Edmonton, the province’s top officers, Bill Sweeney and Rod Knecht, were finishing a meeting when Knecht got the call. There had been multiple shots fired inside a Quonset on a rural property. Four officers were inside and unaccounted for.

“The first disturbing thing to me was that they said from the outside they could see a yellow stripe, horizontal,” Knecht says. “Of course, that was the sign of something bad. And then it just got worse from there.”

It was afternoon by the time the full picture was clear: Four officers and the shooter dead. The most officers killed in a single day in 100 years.

“I saw tragedy before. I made lots of next-of-kin notifications as a young constable … but this was just different,” says Knecht, now chief of the Edmonton Police Service. “I think it was overwhelming for all of us, certainly for anybody that was in policing in the RCMP. It was just unbelievable.”

Outside the force, Knecht says, “The whole country gasped.”

There are 29,000 RCMP officers across Canada. To many, the force is family. There is a particular closeness fostered by the environment in which RCMP officers work: Moving around the country, living in small towns or remote locations, often isolated with only each other to rely on. While tactical teams and equipment were rushed to the scene near Mayerthorpe, news of the shooting reverberated throughout the organization.

Alberta Commanding Officer Marianne Ryan, then a superintendent in B.C.’s Lower Mainland, remembers getting the early reports that officers had been shot. She cried as she watched early news coverage on the TV in her office, though she didn’t personally know any of the officers.

“When these things happen, it shakes us all,” she says. “Everybody feels it at that particular moment in time. It just really, significantly impacts you.”

At every level, officers struggled. There had never been an event like it in the history of RCMP and no one knew exactly how to handle it.

In Mayerthorpe, there was a command centre, teams of forensic and major crimes officers investigating at the scene of the murders, daily briefings.

Knecht knew accountability on the investigation would be “through the roof,” and that the case would be reviewed, analyzed and picked apart for years.

“It was just unbelievable. Four police officers at one time, in one event, in one situation,” Knecht says. “At that point in my career I had a lot of experiences, but there’s nothing that prepares you for that. There was no playbook.”

Other officers in the Mayerthorpe detachment took time off. Pinder and his second-in-command, James Martin, kept working. There was still a detachment to run, with domestic disputes to investigate, thefts and car crashes, the usual calls as life went on in the wake of the murders.

Pinder focused on trying to get the detachment back to some kind of normal operation, a difficult, if not impossible, task. Outside of work, he barely slept.

“It was hard going to work, I’d be fighting back tears many days just driving to work. It was exhausting.”

Letters and cards arrived in bins. People stopped by the detachment every day to give a handshake or a hug. Wanting to shelter the other officers, Pinder and Martin decided they would be the ones to accept the condolences.

“At times, that got to be even too much,” Pinder says. “There were a few days that I had to tell the staff that I just can’t talk to anyone else.”

Soon after the shootings, RCMP launched an undercover investigation into the actions of Dennis Cheeseman and Shawn Hennessey, a partner in Roszko’s marijuana grow operation, who were believed to have helped him that night. Behind the scenes, Knecht struggled for the resources and time needed for such a complex investigation. In public, the secret investigation meant the RCMP couldn’t talk publicly about the case, including responding to rumours and misinformation about the way the shootings happened.

There was growing public speculation that the officers had done something wrong; that they weren’t experienced enough to deal with the situation; that they weren’t properly trained or hadn’t taken the proper precautions dealing with a man known to dislike police.

Knecht was shocked by the criticism and speculation, the “armchair quarterbacking” when the full facts of the case weren’t publicly known. He says it was frustrating not to be able to address the misinformation and to see the harm it caused within the force and to families of the officers who died.

“You want to say something. You want to stick up for your people. You want to say something for the sake of the families,” he says. “You’re frustrated. You’re very frustrated.”

By the time Knecht and others were able to speak during their testimony at the fatality inquiry in 2011, it was too late. Narratives of incompetence, coverup, poor training or lack of equipment, had already taken hold. There was a lingering perception that the RCMP was at fault.

“I think it’s the human condition to ask why did it happen, and say it didn’t have to happen, and we have to find somebody to blame,” Knecht says now. “I think it’s because we want to feel safe or that we can control these kinds of things.”

Knecht says he went over the series of events countless times, looking for things that could have been done differently, or ways other equipment or training would have helped. He says he found none.

“It wouldn’t have mattered if they had the best body armour, if they trained for six months before that,” he says. “They were ambushed, pure and simple. And they didn’t stand a chance.”

Instead, what Knecht came up with was something he learned as a young RCMP officer, badly beaten by several people during a routine traffic stop and dumped, bleeding, into a ditch: A situation can turn quickly. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense and you won’t ever be able to explain it. Police work is inherently dangerous. Some people just hate you.

“You can never prepare for that random act. And Roszko was that random act,” he says. “At the end of the day, you have to blame the person that pulled the trigger. That’s the person that did it.”

Marianne Ryan arrived in Alberta in January 2011, to begin working at K Division in Edmonton. It was nearly six years after the shootings and within days of the beginning of the fatality inquiry into the shootings.

“It’s like it lingers with them,” says Ryan, who now heads the RCMP in Alberta. “It’s like there’s an aura around them. If you know what the history is and you see them, you understand it.”

The fatality inquiry concluded the Mayerthorpe shootings were “a uniquely tragic event which could not reasonably have been foreseen or prevented.”

In his final report, Assistant Chief Judge Daniel Pahl wrote that “there were no failings in the training, experience or abilities of the officers who lost their lives.”

Pahl made a series of recommendations, but by the time his report came out a bevy of changes were already underway within the RCMP. Among the most significant were the purchase of armoured personnel carriers in each province — there are now three in Alberta — new equipment including hard body armour and carbines, and new training scenarios specifically based on the Roszko farm. A behavioural sciences unit has been created to more closely monitor people who may pose threats to the police or public. As Knecht says, “Every town has a James Roszko.”

Ryan says the force has also made significant changes to how it deals with officers after traumatic events. Cadets are taught skills to help them deal with trauma they encounter on the job, and all officers are monitored for signs they may be struggling. More broadly, Ryan said the idea RCMP officers are simply expected to “suck it up,” and the stigma that used to exist around needing help has changed significantly, and continues to evolve.

Ryan says that reflects both the broader changes in society and lessons learned in Mayerthorpe.

“I don’t believe we did enough at that time for our folks that were involved in that,” she says. “Ten years ago, we did not have the same care and the same attention. I don’t even know if PTSD was even part of our common language.”

In the years after the shootings, two officers from the Mayerthorpe detachment left the RCMP and filed multimillion-dollar lawsuits alleging “significant nervous shock and suffering.”

James Martin, the Mayerthorpe detachment’s second-in-command, stayed with the force until last year, when he resigned after pleading guilty to fraud for buying helmets for his girlfriend’s children with an RCMP credit card. A pre-sentence report described the fraud as out of character and related it to the Mayerthorpe shootings.

Pinder, the former head of the Mayerthorpe detachment, says he questioned himself for a long time, going over every choice and action to see what he and the other officers could have done differently.

“I eventually realized, and am comfortable saying, we did everything we should have,” he says. “If we go back in time and I was placed in that same situation without knowing what was to come, we would have done the same thing.”

He says things would be done differently now, but that’s because the RCMP has learned and changed.

Pinder’s final day with the RCMP was last week, 27 years and one day after he was sworn into the force. He wanted to make it to 30 years, but couldn’t. The reason is Mayerthorpe.

“It’s something I live with every day,” he says. “I think about it every day. Some aspect of Mayerthorpe will pop up every day. Some days more often than others. And that’s just something you just have to learn to cope with.”

He doesn’t want to say much more.

Knecht calls Mayerthorpe a defining moment in his life, something that had a profound impact on him as both an officer and a person.

“It really did touch me. It changed me emotionally,” he says. “I was a very unemotional guy … I probably could count the number of times I’d cried before that.”

Knecht chokes up when he talks about getting that first call, about what it was like to be with the officers’ families on those long March days 10 years ago. He remembers how the sun broke through at one of the funerals, turning a grey sky suddenly into gold.

“Brock Myrol, his favourite band was Bon Jovi,” he says, his voice falling to a whisper. “Every time I hear a Bon Jovi song, I think about him.”

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